Weekly Update 4.3.09
April 3rd, 2009Remember that speech contest Joanne Stroshine was helping students participate in? It was a Monadnock student that is going onto the semi-finals in Henniker, Miss. Natale Novak. The semi-final rounds are on May 3, and hopefully from there Miss Novak will move onto the District Conference District Conference on May 30th.
Even better? Second place went to Katrina Baumgartner. First and second taken by MRHS students—very, very cool.
Speaking of awesome work done by MRHS students…
The Monadnock students involved in the technologies conference rocked. Levi Smith and Derick DuBois took the first place trophy for “Constuction Challenge”, while Chris Jablonski and Dylan Bresnahan second place trophy in “Structual Engineering”. Levi Smith and Derick DuBois won third place trophy in “Technology Problem Solving”, and finally Sarah Dick, Chris Jablonski, and Nick Amer won third place in the “Technology Bowl”.
It’s been a good week.
The Future Business Leaders of America—one of the few clubs in which I participated oh so very long ago¹—headed off to Manchester for Thursday and Friday. Mike Brown has been working with them, and from what I’ve seen over the years, the conference is the highlight of the school year for a good chunk of these kids—they usually come back pumped and heads filled with things they had never realized before.
Which is probably the point.
If you missed it, Deb Crowder was one of four award-winning Antioch New England alumni who were part of a panel discussion on teaching and learning in today’s schools. All of the panelists won a variety of honors and have interesting things to share with the audience about being effective as a teacher today.
I’m not sure if we needed more proof of her talents, but it is nice that the rest of the area recognizes what we have in the art-room.
Clay Burrel over at Change.org had an interesting little commentary about Paul Krugman. It’s an interesting read, and I don’t disagree with any part of it.
When I was in high school, I loved science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Piers Anthony, Jules Verne, Larry Niven, and a host of others were the thing that kept me going. I spent a huge chunk of time with my nose in a book—usually reading when I should have been doing something else (usually math)—and probably would have gone into the sciences (if they hadn’t involved math).
The part that always got me was that there was very little fiction in science fiction. Science Fiction dates harder than any other literature—read Pride and Prejudice and much of it still holds true today—but reading about rocket ships to the moon for work sounds a little dated right now.
But that’s only because our technology has caught—and so far surpassed—what could have been imagined. Star Trek’s communicator is being used by almost every child in America—and, really, so is the tri-corder and a host of other things that could only be dreamed of before¹.
Today’s readers of science fiction are tomorrows engineers and designers. Writers of science fiction—especially good science fiction—raise the ethical issues which we will need to answer when the dreams are in a child’s hands. It’s in our fiction, in that space that we wonder “what if” that we can get a glimpse of where we can—or do not wish to—go.
I would love to see—and it’s been discussed—an integrated series of courses that really look at technology and design, with science fiction as the English component. For the right kind of kid—who already loves science fiction, who already loves dreaming—it might be enough to give them the skills in technology and design that they can do something with it.
Even if they do stink at math.
1 Seriously. Star Trek is a gold mine for this stuff.↺
